Do you still need a professional to sell your house when the market is hot?

First of all, let me just say that I completely get it. When we recently sold our house I had friends of neighbors knocking on my door and I was motivated to save a commission by selling it before it went on the market. But I made a decision to put my money where my mouth was and we listed our house on the multiple listing service (MLS) and had results that exceeded my expectations. I ended up getting competing offers that drove the price up and we received $10,000 over what we had been listed for. The power of marketing to get exposure to as many buyers as possible was extremely effective!

Recently I had a family that I had met with and they were so nice and were the first to admit they didn’t know much about selling property. However, they had friends of neighbors knocking on their door and they had a financial need to net as much as possible out of the sale of their home. (This is my goal as well!) I can’t blame them for having this reaction as this is the same reaction that I had! However, I still deep down believe that using the services of our team not only makes for a smoother transaction that is much more likely to actually close, but it also nets them more money.

The potential buyer didn’t end up wanting to purchase within the time frame that they needed and so they went ahead and listed their property and I was able to put theory into action. We put their home on the market for as close to market value as we could figure. We had significant traffic over the next couple of days and ended up receiving an offer for 7% over list price. I am almost positive that the would be buyer their neighbor knew was not planning on offering full price (because they also wanted to save the agent compensation). So, it wasn’t just a statistic, it was a realty. They lived the statistic researched by the National Association of REALTORS® that homes sold with an agent sells for 9% more than homes sold by owner.

I know that I had a lot of bias, it’s just that I’ve seen this so often. I can fully appreciate wanting to net as much as possible from the sale of your home, and I deeply and strongly believe that using our services is the way to do that!